Many of our readers have no doubt noticed a pronounced change in the Methods section of Nature Methods papers published online over the past several weeks. Brief Communications now have a Methods section for the first time ever and in manuscript types that already had a Methods section, the section has been expanded and moved to the end of the paper.

These changes are described in detail in an Editorial accompanying the May issue of the journal. The new design is similar to what Nature implemented in 2007 and we hope our authors and readers appreciate the greatly expanded space this provides for methodological details. We are relieved that we will no longer have to relegate important methodological details to Supplementary Information and we expect our authors will appreciate being able to include more citations in their papers.

A potential downside of this change is that the print and online versions of papers have quite different levels of methodological detail. What do you think? Those of you who are online readers may not have very strong opinions on this, but what about our print readers? If anyone who regularly receives a print copy of the journal is reading this, we would like your feedback as well.